Angels Sponsor Offers Weakest Imaginable Excuse for Not Donating $1 Million to Charity

Like many MLB teams, the Anaheim Angels—sorry, the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim—have partnered with a corporate sponsor on a season-long promotion that is equal parts in-stadium advertisement and heartwarming community outreach opportunity: Sherwin-Williams, a Fortune 500 company with annual sales approaching $12 billion, gets to install a giant novelty Sherwin-Williams-branded paint can in center field. If an Angels player somehow manages to hit a home run that lands inside this cylindrical billboard, the company agrees to give a cool $1 million to the Angels Baseball Foundation, which doles out grants a variety of youth-focused organizations in Southern California.

Lo and behold, on Tuesday night, Angels outfielder Justin Upton launched a solo home run onto the ballpark's center-field landscaping, where it bounced high in the air before plopping neatly into the paint can's welcoming embrace.

Sherwin-Williams, however, isn't breaking out its oversized checkbook, because the ball that Upton hit into the paint can didn't land on the fly. From ESPN:

[T]he Angels said Upton's homer would not count for the $1 million
donation because it bounced before it went inside the paint can. To
count, the homer would have had to land inside the can without
bouncing, the team said.

In what appears to be a 2014 press release announcing the promotion, some sharp-eyed lawyer indeed managed to slip in a note that payout would be conditioned on the home run's uninterrupted flight from bat to receptacle. (Frazee Paint is now owned by Sherwin-Williams.)

As part of the in-game promotion, Frazee Paint has positioned the
oversized paint can in Angel Stadium's left-center field terrace turf,
450 feet away from home plate. The height of the can is 10 feet in the
back and 9 feet in the front, creating a more convenient angle for the
batter. The mouth of the can measures 8-1/2 feet in diameter, and a
home run ball hit by an Angels player that lands in the can on the
fly will benefit the Foundation.

The team and its corporate sponsors are free to draw up the terms of their agreements however they please. But it's truly baffling that no one involved in the negotiation of this contract realized that in the extremely unlikely event that an Angels player actually manages to propel a baseball into an eight-foot target from 450 feet away, issuing a stilted "Well, actually" press release the next day explaining why a multibillion-dollar corporation doesn't have to donate the equivalent of its couch cushion change to help fund at-risk youth shelters would make everyone involved look like greedy idiots.

The Angels are currently 1.5 games out of one of the American League's two Wild Card spots, so they still have something to play for. I hope their late-season playoff push features a remarkable, laser-accurate streak of power hitting.